Nostalgia marketing—best practices for brands

The ‘90s are back, baby. But so are the go-go 80s. And the indie sleaze of the early 2000s. And if cultural oracles are to be believed, the resurgence of 2010s pop is a recession indicator. Wait—the ‘90s? Is that the 1990s or the 1890s? Because the soaring inequalities of the Gilded Age are feeling closer than ever. There’s no consensus on what past era we’re channeling as we stare down 2025, but with so much shifting—culturally, politically, socially—many of us are asking the same question: When have we been here before? Nostalgia used to move in predictable cycles. The 1980s, in all their prosperity and excess, were a reboot of the Roaring Twenties—art deco aesthetics, hedonism and even drop-waist dresses made a comeback. And for the past decade and a half, we’ve been in a long-running revival of midcentury modernism—launched by “Mad Men,” trickling into startup office design and eventually morphing into a flattened, value-engineered form found everywhere from renovated fast food restaurants to teasing posts about Millennial Grey. That arc now seems to be closing, realigning high modernism with its more sinister side, embodied by the sterile dystopia of “Severance.” Data-Driven Marketing Playbook Join us May 22 in NYC to explore how data powers marketing Learn more here But now, all bets are off. The cycle is more complicated. Time has collapsed. The references are omnipresent, layered and remixed in a way that makes nostalgia feel less like a linear revival and more like an open-source archive. TikTok trend analysts track aesthetic revivals obsessively, and CARI (the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute) catalogs hyper-specific aesthetics—like the exact vibe of an early ‘90s coffee shop. The mood board makes itself. And maybe this temporal fluidity has something to do with the way we now think about personal identity: not as a fixed thing, but as a series of eras. Pop stars led the way, reinventing themselves with new aesthetic sensibilities, and often looking to the past in the process. (Where would Sabrina Carpenter be without her references to the screen sirens of Golden Age Hollywood?) Now this language has crossed over into everyday life. We narrate our own style shifts and life changes as eras—a framing that suggests nostalgia isn’t just something we look back on, but something we define the boundaries of in real time. How brands play the nostalgia game Brands have always induced, amplified and responded to nostalgia, but the strategies have multiplied. Some revive past versions of themselves, such as Cartier leaning into its Must collection. Others repackage history through a new lens—the “Barbie” movie, which wasn’t so much about resurrecting an icon as it was giving it new cultural meaning. Then there are brands that claim a past from before they were born, casting themselves as instant classics. Think of Skims shimmying into references to ‘70s apres ski shoots and early 2000s Victoria’s Secret, or Vacation selling sunscreen as if for the cocaine-fueled beaches of 80s Miami. Nostalgia, when a brand does it right, is a flex. It signals permanence: It feels like we’ve always been here, and we always will be. It also says: We have the range to shift with the times without losing ourselves. But it’s not enough to just make a nostalgia play; you have to decide how. With so many references to choose, how do you pick one that will resonate? Learning vs. longing Consider that all forms of nostalgia are about learning and longing. That’s it. The most effective brands tap into at least one—if not both. Nostalgia-as-learning is about making sense of the present. We look back to see where history might be repeating itself. What did past generations know that we’ve forgotten? What struggles are resurfacing now? Right now, there’s a renewed fascination with eras that dealt with volatility—the late Weimar Republic, the 1970s, the early 2000s. These weren’t stable or idyllic times, but they offer clues for how to navigate cultural and economic precarity. The growing interest in Art Nouveau furniture and Viennese coffee houses? Maybe it’s just aesthetic drift, or maybe it’s a subconscious response to the question: How do people create beauty and community in the face of uncertainty? This is also why the most successful nostalgia plays recreate emotional lived experiences, not only aesthetics. “Stranger Things” was more specific than ‘80s revival. It tapped into the feeling of unsupervised childhood adventure, something that feels rare in an era of helicopter parenting. And when McDonald’s released Grimace’s Birthday as a Game Boy Color game in 2023, it was an intuitive response to digital fatigue. At a time when AI and VR were accelerating at breakneck speed, a low-fi, pixelated game felt grounding. Ad Age Small Agency Awards Showcase your agency’s creativity, business success and commitment to a thriving workplace. Enter today By contrast, nostalgia-as-longing is about seeking comfort—sometimes in a past you lived through, sometimes in one you wish you had. It explains the recent wave of TikToks romanticizing early-2000s suburbia. For millennials and Gen Z, this goes beyond core memories. It’s about a longing for an era when middle-class life felt more accessible. For home ownership that wasn’t a fantasy. For a kind of stability that now seems out of reach. And sometimes, it’s about escaping into an imagined past that never existed quite as we picture it. The recent fixation on pre-social media technology—flip phones, wired headphones even iPhone 4 cameras before AI was baked in—has little to do with their actual function and everything to do with what they represent: a world before constant surveillance, before infinite scrolling, before everything was documented in HD. Viral clips of high schoolers from the ‘90s just hanging out (including one with over five million likes) boast comment sections where the consensus is that it must have been a better, happier time. This is why nostalgia can’t be reduced to just an aesthetic. It’s not just about how the ‘90s or the ‘80s or the ‘70s looked. It’s about what those eras represent in the present. So, if nostalgia today is fluid, multilayered and deeply personal, then the best nostalgia plays aren’t just about referencing the past—they’re about tapping into why a particular past resonates now. Start by identifying what your audience is searching for: Are they looking to make sense of the present through past parallels, or are they longing for a world that seems like it no longer exists? What generation do they belong to? Are they facing a unique set of challenges in the life stage they’re in? From there, choose your approach. Then, decide whether to show your reference points overtly or remix them into something that feels new. Do you invite audiences to revisit an era, or do you let them discover it for the first time? Do you lean into nostalgia as comfort or as a way to reframe the present? In other words: the best nostalgia marketing doesn’t only resurrect old ideas. It makes new ones that, one day, people will look back on with nostalgia of their own. See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here

Nostalgia marketing—best practices for brands

Featured Stories